Common questions.
Most of these get asked in the first email. Worth answering up front so the conversation can start somewhere further along.
What does Two Words actually do?
We are a design and engineering consultancy. We work with enterprises and ambitious founders on the digital products and platforms their business depends on. Our practice spans design, engineering, and AI, usually together on the same engagement.
Most of our work is in regulated industries — wealth, tax, fintech, pharma, consulting. Industries where the product has to clear policy, satisfy regulation, and still feel like one good idea.
How is this different from a traditional agency?
Most agencies are organised around delivery. We are organised around the business behind the delivery. Our team comes from finance, law, and operations as much as from design. The work tends to start where other firms hand off — a business model that hasn’t been pressure-tested, a regulatory constraint nobody wants to design around, an AI capability the team isn’t sure what to do with.
Practically: smaller team, senior throughout, no account managers between you and the people doing the work.
How long does a project take?
It depends on the shape of the engagement. We work in three modes:
Discovery sprints run two to four weeks and end with a written direction. Projects run eight to sixteen weeks for most product and brand work. Embedded partner engagements are open-ended, usually twelve months and up, for platforms with a long horizon.
We prefer to talk through the right shape on a call. Most engagements start as one mode and become another.
What does this cost?
We don’t publish rate cards because we don’t sell hours. Engagements are scoped to the work, the timeline, and the team needed. Most of our projects sit in a range that makes sense for series-A-and-up companies and enterprise clients with a real budget for the work.
We will tell you plainly in the first conversation if the scope and the budget don’t match.
Who actually does the work?
We are a small team across Mumbai and Manchester. Designers, engineers, an operations lead, a project manager. There are no account managers, no strategists who don’t ship.
The team you meet in week one is the team that ships in month nine. We take on a limited number of engagements each year so the senior team stays on every project, start to finish.
Where are you based?
Two studios. Mumbai is the home studio, where the company began and where most of the work still gets made. Manchester is our second base, closer to our European clients.
The legal entities behind the studios are Timbre Technologies Pvt Ltd in India and Two Words Digital UK in the United Kingdom. Most engagements are billed from the studio closest to the client.
Who owns the work?
You do. Once we are paid, the IP for everything we deliver on your project transfers to you. We retain the right to reference the engagement in our portfolio and case studies, subject to whatever confidentiality terms we agree at the start.
We respect NDAs strictly. Most of the work on our roster is under one.
Do you work with early-stage founders?
Sometimes. We work with founders whose product is the strategy — where the design and engineering decisions are the business decisions. Not for a logo, not for a landing page, not for a pitch deck. For the actual thing they are building.
If that’s what you have in mind, write to us. If you’re looking for a brand agency or a freelance site build, we can point you somewhere better.
How do we start?
Send a short email to inbox@twowords.io. Two lines is enough. We reply to everything within two working days, and if we are not the right fit for what you’re working on we will say so plainly and try to point you somewhere better.